The Family: A Read with Jenna Pick
A Read with Jenna Pick (A Novel)
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3.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The Instant New York Times bestseller
A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick
A captivating debut novel about the tangled fates of two best friends and daughters of the Italian mafia, and a coming-of-age story of twentieth-century Brooklyn itself.
Two daughters. Two families. One inescapable fate.
Sofia Colicchio is a free spirit, loud and untamed. Antonia Russo is thoughtful, ever observing the world around her. Best friends since birth, they live in the shadow of their fathers’ unspoken community: the Family. Sunday dinners gather them each week to feast, discuss business, and renew the intoxicating bond borne of blood and love.
But the disappearance of Antonia’s father drives a whisper-thin wedge between the girls as they grow into women, wives, mothers, and leaders. Their hearts expand in tandem with Red Hook and Brooklyn around them, as they push against the boundaries of society’s expectations and fight to preserve their complex but life-sustaining friendship. One fateful night their loyalty to each other and the Family will be tested. Only one of them can pull the trigger before it’s too late.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Imagine The Godfather told from the perspective of daughters and wives. That’s the vibe of Naomi Krupitsky’s tantalizing, cinematic debut, set in the decades before and during World War II. The story follows bookish Antonia and impulsive Sofia, best friends since birth who have been raised like sisters in the orbit of a powerful Brooklyn-based mafia syndicate. When Antonia’s father mysteriously disappears, a rift develops between the girls, and over the next 20 years, they take turns making mistakes, feeling suffocated by domesticity, and wanting out of the family business. Most of the violence happens far away from the kitchens, churches, and bedrooms Krupitsky’s women populate, and she has a keen eye for portraying the undulations of female friendships. Reminiscent of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, The Family is hard to put down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this nicely written but slow-moving debut, two fierce heroines, daughters of mobsters, come of age in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, in the 1930s and '40s. First-generation Sicilian American Sofia Colicchio grows up learning that "Family is everything." It's a bitter pill. When her best friend Antonia Russo's father, Carlo, is caught skimming the books and "disappeared," Antonia becomes even more dependent on the "Family" that killed her father, as it provides for her and her mother. As the power of Sofia's father, Joey, grows, so does Sofia's attraction to seizing power of her own, though there's no place for women in the organization, while Antonia tries to distance herself from the Family. Krupitsky follows Sofia and Antonia from early childhood through marriage and motherhood as each fight to carve out their independence and sense of self, and Antonia faces months of postpartum depression. Their experiences are shaped by WWII and a country where immigrants like Joey absorb such messages as "stay with your own kind; take the jobs we do not want," forcing them to carve out their own version of an "American dream" that must be "gleaned, bought or stolen." While a violent showdown at the end involving Sofia and Antonia feels jarring, Krupitsky beautifully captures their day-to-day lives under never-ending tension. The women's rich stories make this worthwhile.
